30. Locke
30
LOCKE
Wren had been born sleeping on this ward. Rocco’s wife—Lettie—had died here, birthing fuckin’ twins, a memory I’d somehow drowned out until this moment, thanks to Ranger and Folk blocking it as resolutely as I had.
This fuckin’ ward, though...
The pictures on the walls were different now, and more than two decades had passed since that night, but somehow it smelled the same.
I sat alone in a room, just a sweet-scented bundle in my arms for company. A girl, born screaming into my arms. Born alive , as blood and energy had seeped from Orla, slackening her limbs, her consciousness fading as sirens bore down on us—firefighters who couldn’t do more for Orla than I already had.
Haemorrhage.
I’d known it even before the paramedics, who showed ten minutes later, had radioed it in, blue-lighting Orla and the baby to the hospital, taking Nash with them and leaving me at the side of the road.
Somehow I’d made it here. I’d never recall how.
The bundle in my arms shifted, tiny sounds coming from her tiny mouth. She had fair skin and eyes that wouldn’t close, her gaze fixed on me, waiting for news I couldn’t give her yet. Of her mum, of her unborn sibling. Of her dad and whatever hair he had left by the end of this. “I’m just the bonus pops, baby girl. Can’t wait for you to meet the real thing.”
I murmured the words so softly they were little more than a low rumble from my chest. The buzz from my phone was louder and my grip on it tightened, but I didn’t read the message on the screen. Couldn’t—cos it wasn’t Nash telling me our woman had made it through life-saving surgery. That our baby had survived. I had no clue who it was and no capacity to care. I’d spoken to no one since I’d hurled out texts and called Logan when I got here.
Couldn’t remember what I’d said.
What anyone had said to me.
Just that I’d been alone in this room since a midwife who knew me—who knew us —had ushered me inside and brought me the only light in my world right now.
Outside, the night faded into a crisp morning. I rose and moved to the window, showing our baby girl the first sunrise she’d ever see. Worry gnawed at my heart—raw fear—but the little hand clutching my finger kept the worst of it at bay. The devil was done with me. I’d lost enough.
“Locke?”
I spun around. The midwife who’d brought me the baby hovered in the doorway.
“No news. But your brother is here. Shall I bring him down?”
Brother . Cam, probably, but in truth it could’ve been anyone. Whoever had got here first, so maybe River.
I nodded.
The midwife darted away and the encounter dropped out of my mind. I went back to flitting my stare between the window and the baby, my daughter in all ways but blood.
My third baby girl.
Fuckin’ hell.
Footsteps sounded behind me. I didn’t turn. Didn’t even look up. But the tug in my heart had other ideas and my gaze drifted from the baby to one so familiar I thought it my own.
Logan .
Shock barrelled through me. Was I dead? Had the heart attack I was surely fuckin’ due finished me off? “How—how are you here?”
Logan drew closer, dumping his coat on a nearby chair. “I was already on my way when you called.”
“Why?”
“Just had a feeling this was where I needed to be today.”
Weirder things had happened in the forty years we’d walked the earth together, and if I hadn’t been in desperate need of a distraction, I might’ve believed my twin. But I saw the half-truth as clear as the day dawning outside and he fuckin’ knew it.
“I needed to talk to you,” he amended. “But it can wait.”
Like fuck it could, but a disgruntled cry from the puddle of tiny limbs in my arms put any plans I had to interrogate Lo on hold.
His gruff features melted. “Who’s this?”
“Who do you think it is?”
He rolled his eyes and moved to the sink to wash his hands. “How’s Orla?”
“I don’t know.”
“Still in surgery?”
“Yeah.”
Logan dried his hands and came back, taking the baby from me as if he handled five-pound bags of flesh and bone all the time. “What about the other?—”
“Don’t.”
Logan took a soft breath and gazed down at the baby girl in his arms, the same gentleness on his face as when Willow had been born. He’d never got to hold Wren. “Well, look at her. She’s small, Lockie.”
He hadn’t called me that since we were teenagers. I didn’t want to think about why it had slipped out of him now. Or the possibility that baby girl was our biggest baby. “She’s strong ,” I said instead.
“You all are.” Logan tilted his head just enough to make contact with mine. “It’s going to be all right. Just hold on a little longer, okay?”
Until he said it, I didn’t realise how close I was to the edge. Tears burned my eyes. “I can’t lose them.”
Logan held my gaze, toughness shining through the love. “You’re not going to. I can fucking feel it.”
The midwife knocked on the door again. “Still no news, but Orla’s brother is here, and I can’t have so many of you on the ward at once.”
“I’ll go.” Logan handed me the baby.
Terror seized me.
He felt it and gripped my shoulders. “I meant outside to the fucking corridor. I’m not going anywhere, I promise.”
“Don’t leave.”
“I won’t.”
But he had to leave this room , taking the stoicism I’d leaned on my whole fuckin’ life with him, and I panicked every second he was gone until not one, but two brothers slipped into the room and surrounded me.
Cam.
River.
They wore the same expression of nervous anticipation. Of dread as they found me alone and holding a baby.
River froze. “Where is she?”
“Surgery.” I tried to school my face. “She bled a lot. They took her down to fix it.”
“But they can fix it?” River glanced at the door, as if he was having the same visions I was of blasting into the operating theatre and standing over the surgeons until they made this right. “Was it bad?”
I shrugged, cos honestly, I didn’t know—it had been too dark and chaotic for me to tell how much blood Orla had lost. “Haemorrhaging was always a risk,” I said instead. “It’s why the C-section was planned, but Little Miss had other ideas. Orls had her in the car.”
The collective O’Brian gaze fell on the baby in my arms. Silent until now, Cam followed Logan’s path to the sink and washed up.
River shoved his hands in his pockets, as if it pained him to lay eyes on Orla’s child until he knew she’d be okay.
Cam came back. I laid the baby in his arms and pulled River into a hug, feeling the anxiety trembling though him in every fuckin’ nerve, digging deep for the words Logan had pushed on me. “It’s going to be all right, brother. We just have to wait.”
For the best news or the worst, and I didn’t tell them about the other baby.
Not yet.
Cam took a seat, entranced by his newborn niece. “She’s so small.”
“Five pound six.”
He whistled, glancing at River. “Smaller than you.”
River hovered by the window, his gaze fixed on a sky the same shade as Nash’s kind eyes. “We can’t all be a nine-pound chungus.”
I blinked. “That’s why Rubi calls you Chungus Cam?”
“Only when I’m too bladdered to chin him.” Cam went back to staring at the baby.
I took a breath that went nowhere and sat next to him. “How’s the hangover?”
“Had its moments.” Cam almost smiled, but it faded as he met my gaze. “Want to tell me what the fuck happened?”
I filled him in, mindful of River’s coiled-spring demeanour, again leaving out that whatever surgical wizardry was saving his sister’s life right now included an emergency C-section that was a world away from the calm birth she deserved.
Cam took it all in, the twitch in his jaw the only sign of stress. “Rubi’s outside with your brother. I told everyone else to stay home.”
I’d walk on water before I believed Saint and Alexei had obeyed him, but I kept that to myself. Checked my phone. Strained my fucked-up ears for the sound of the midwife’s squeaky trainers on the shiny floor.
“Have you done anything about Willow’s boyfriend yet?”
Startled, I jerked my head to where River still stood like an unexploded hand grenade.
“Sorry.” He chewed on his lip. “I need to think about something else.”
So he’d picked the last thing I wanted to fuckin’ think about. Amazing. But I didn’t have it in me to do anything but answer the damn question. “I cracked and asked her about it. She told me to mind my own business. I thought I’d fucked it, then she called me back and it turns out he isn’t twenty-five. He said he was cos he’d heard her trying to convince Sol Bosanko she was twenty-three. Guess Oscar didn’t catch that bit.”
River winced. “Sorry.”
“For what? Not his fault I nearly blew my own gasket, is it? Orls told me to wait, and she was right.”
“How old is he then?”
“Nineteen. And he still drives like a twat.” I sighed. “But Willow said he’s nice and that’s all I should care about.”
“How’d that land with you?”
My knuckles itched for me to crack them, fingers retracting into clenched fists before I caught them. “She’s grown and she has her own life. How that lands with me doesn’t fuckin’ matter anymore.”
River wanted to argue, I could tell. For the sake of it, as much as anything. But the baby chattered again, diverting whatever he’d meant to say.
In spite of himself, he ventured closer, peering at her face, his own more Malone than O’Brian. “Does she have a name?”
“I think so.”
If Orla’s intentions hadn’t changed.
But I didn’t give that up either. I held River’s gaze until hurried footsteps rerouted my attention.
Then I was on my feet before the midwife appeared in the doorway, my name on her lips.
“Locke? You need to come with me.”